


They are hostile nations

by bulletville (foxlives)



Category: Justified
Genre: M/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 01:01:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,176
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2794028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxlives/pseuds/bulletville
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Surviving is the only war we can afford.</p>
            </blockquote>





	They are hostile nations

_june_

 

The sky is wide, flayed open over the mountains. Heavy, smoggy air hits his face as he walks out of the mine and he welcomes it, anything better than the air inside, breathing in coal dust and the sweat smell of men trapped under the earth. He's sick with it before he even starts.

He puts his back to the the gutted mountain, the dead end this whole county runs in to. A last resort becoming an only resort, a bad acid taste in Raylan's mouth when he thinks about how he was never going to end up like this. A summer out of high school and he's already here, shoulders bent and aching and hands that are never gonna get clean again, maybe for the rest of his life.

He walks into the bar half-blind with fatigue and the shame of it, walking into a puddle bar with coal dust on his hands. He orders bourbon, whatever they've got, and sits down heavy on one of the gouged and battered stools. His spine arcs into a tired slump without his permission and he hates that, his body being stolen away from him.

A voice next to him says, "Raylan Givens," and he's mad before he even looks up. He's astounded someone recognizes him like this and angry that they do, and then he does look up and finds Boyd Crowder half-smiling at him from behind the lip of his glass.

Disconsolate and unwilling, Raylan sips at the bourbon before he says, "Crowder." He's not looking, so it takes him a moment to realize Boyd's grinning at him. His teeth are eerie-white, set deep in his coal-stained face.

"Didn't know you'd started in the mine," Boyd says, and Raylan's willing to concede it might be his imagination that makes Boyd's tone seem taunting. He's not overly willing to concede to his better nature at the moment, though, and he slams back the rest of the drink and orders another. He has the money for exactly three and he doesn't want to nurse them, wants to get drunk and leave here.

Boyd seems to understand something of this, gets up without a fight and walks away. It doesn't ease Raylan's nerves any, though, and as soon as Boyd gets up Raylan wants to follow him, wants to draw him into a fight.

"Hey," he says, twisting around on the bar stool. Boyd pauses, a hitch in his step. Raylan hadn't planned out what he was going to do from here, and he and Boyd stare a moment, locked up in each other.

Boyd raises his eyebrows, _what're you gonna do about it?_ Raylan doesn't really know the answer but it isn't sitting here and letting Boyd smirk at him like that, he knows for sure. He finishes his whiskey and heads for the door, pulls Boyd along with him like gravity.

It's mostly dark, sun fallen behind the hills, just enough light to make their skin glow eerie in the dusk. "What do you wanna do now, Raylan?" Boyd asks, low-voiced and calm. It's enough to drive Raylan crazy, the day he's fucking had and now Boyd, somehow maddening in his very presence in Raylan's world.

Raylan turns on him, spitting mad and without even knowing why. "You tryin to start something?"

"Think you're the one startin things, Raylan," Boyd says, with a smile like he's knows exactly what's going to happen next.

Raylan's knuckles hit the sharp jut of Boyd's jaw; Raylan watches it like he's a long way away, or underwater, the flat sound of the punch and the angle Boyd's head snaps back to. He looks back at Raylan with a grin that's all in his eyes, pushes him back til Raylan stumbles on the crumbled asphalt and then Raylan's going down hard, Boyd on top of him. Raylan's breath is knocked out and he struggles a minute against the thick summer air, floundered.

Boyd doesn't give him a chance to recover and Raylan respects that; the punch draws straight across his mouth and then he's spitting blood.

Boyd gets off him and lets Raylan roll onto his hands and knees, breathing heavy. He pushes himself up to get another swing in and Boyd gives as good as he gets; it takes another few stinging minutes to get them into a deadlock, neither willing to give up but with some recognition in them that they're too well matched.

They slump panting against the bar's wall, corrugated steel ridged against their backs. Raylan's face feels numb, the heavy metallic taste of his own blood on his tongue, but he has some satisfaction in the bruise blooming on Boyd's jaw and the careful way he's holding himself. Next to him, Boyd's smiling like he could do this forever. 

Staring out at the depth charged Kentucky night, he wonders about how this is the best he's felt in weeks.

 

*

 

He goes back to the house that night with his knuckles bloodied up, a few bruised ribs. The night is damp and infinitely black, the kind of summer night that never really cools off, darkness making the heat cling tighter to everything it sees. Raylan's tired down to his bones, adrenaline dissipated somewhere on the hypnotic country roads between the bar and here.

He moves slow up the porch steps, one palm flattened against his side. He eases his key into the lock and says a brief childish prayer that his father won't be home tonight.

He isn't; instead it's his mama, sitting at the kitchen table with her shoulders bent over, playing solitaire by the harsh sodium light crawling through the window. "Mama?" he asks, quiet. She looks up.

"Where have you been," she says, too tired to make it a question. He always feels guilty around his mother, a dull buzz in his head he can't shake.

He shrugs and hopes he's far enough outside the spread of light that she can't see his split lip, the bruise welling up around his eye. His ribs are aching badly and he thinks about work tomorrow, all the kinds of hell that's going to be.

Silence drags between them. When he was a kid his mama seemed invincible, steady and strong as steel. He'd always had faith, bright and unsubstantiated, that someday she'd leave here and take him with her—a fitting act for his mother who could do just about anything. He'd realized early on this kind of thinking was stupid, and dangerous besides, but that doesn't mean he doesn't still feel betrayed.

His mother's game has stalled; she stares at the shingled rows of cards with a soft frown, before she sighs and gathers them to her, facing them all the same way.

Raylan drags himself toward the stairs, pauses with one hand on the doorframe. "Goodnight, Mama."

He can feel her watching him; he looks over his shoulder, not quite looking back at her. All she says is, "There's aspirin over the sink."

He nods, grateful. Bow-backed and exhausted, he makes his way up the stairs.

 

 

_july_

 

He wades out into the asphalt sea of the mine parking lot and waits for Boyd to get off his shift, sits down heavy on the bumper of the truck. Sometime between beating each other bloody outside a puddle bar and now, Boyd had offered to drive Raylan to the mine when their shifts overlapped, and Raylan had said yes. His own reasoning is often a mystery to him but he doesn't have a car of his own, wouldn't ever think of borrowing his daddy's and he can't keep borrowing Helen's, not the hours he works. It's practical, he tells himself.

Raylan smokes three cigarettes on an empty stomach, tries to will himself at least to the cab. There's a spare key Boyd has tucked in the undercarriage but Raylan doesn't like using it, doesn't like having it in his hand. Like Boyd is giving Raylan the option of just driving away and leaving him behind because Boyd knows Raylan won't do it, but Raylan isn't so sure.

But he twists out the cigarette and uses the key anyway because that whole thought process is stupid and he doesn't like that he has it, every time. He slumps down in the passenger seat and dozes, one eye open, like he does when his dad's home. Always waiting for something else to go wrong.

Some indeterminate amount of time later the driver's-side door whines, pulled open against its will. Boyd says, "Hey," low-voiced, exhausted.

Raylan grunts, too tired to do much else. He stays slumped down in the seat as Boyd gets in, unwilling or maybe unable to make a show of anything.

The ride is inevitably quiet between them, heavy quiet. They keep the windows rolled all the way down, and the long summer nights give them a light sky to drive home under, but Raylan thinks toward the coming winter and making this drive in the oppressive mountain dark and something starts dragging in his chest, a dread he wishes desperately he could go the rest of his life without feeling again.

"You wanna get drunk later?" Boyd asks into the white noise of the drive. He tips his head toward Raylan without really looking at him.

"No," Raylan says, though he does. It's a knee-jerk reaction with him, refusing Boyd things. Toe-holds in his life.

"Suit yourself," Boyd tells him.

 

*

 

They pull up the twisted driveway to Raylan's house, tires coughing up dust. Boyd stalls the engine and says, "Mind if I come in, wash up?"

Raylan is loath to let Boyd into the house, but his daddy's truck is missing from its spot of deadened grass and his mama's probably at Helen's, and really, he can't think of a good reason not to. This is a part of his life that's too fucked up on its own to be any further fucked up by Boyd's presence, and maybe there's solace in that.

He lets them in and leads up the narrow stairs, Boyd's boots echoing hollowly in perfect time to his own. The bathroom is cramped, the hexagonal pattern of the floor disrupted by cracks and missing tiles. Raylan fills the sink with water and throws Boyd a towel.

They strip down to their undershirts and wash up in silence. The mine showers had only been letting out a rusty drip the whole week, and anyway, there's something particularly awful about it, stripped literally naked in that dank room under the ground. Raylan drags a wet hand through his hair, pushing it back off his face. He makes a point not to look at himself in the mirror.

"Christ," he mutters under his breath, and Boyd looks at him. "Nothin," he says. "Just hate this fuckin coal dust fuckin everywhere. Jesus."

"Amen," Boyd says. There's a twist to his mouth. "You ever think of doin something else?"

Raylan looks at him, narrow-eyed. "Need the money," he says slowly, "so I can get outta here to do somethin else."

Boyd looks at him patiently. "I mean somethin else in Harlan County." He pauses. "Might be a place for you."

Raylan scoffs in disbelief. He's angry, suddenly, like being hit by a two-by-four. "You askin me to run drugs for your daddy?"

"Don't gotta be drugs," Boyd says calmly, "and it don't got to be for my daddy."

Raylan shakes his head, slow. "The fuck do you think I'm gonna say?" he spits. "No, Boyd, I ain't gonna run anything for anyone. I'm getting outta here," he says, but it feels tired out in his mouth, words worn to grit on his tongue.

"But until then," Boyd says, knowing better than to argue that last. That more than anything pisses Raylan the fuck off, Boyd having no right to know him like that.

Raylan grinds his teeth a minute, and says, "I don't get you, Boyd," angrier than he ever meant to be and a little unsure, still, why he is. "You think you're so goddamn smart but you won't even think about leavin here, won't even enter your insane fuckin head there's a world out there waitin while you're sittin here rottin in Harlan fuckin County."

Boyd just looks at him, that look of his. Something shifts in Raylan's gut, a tectonic reaction to Boyd's thousand-mile gaze. Raylan clenches his jaw, unwilling to be affected.

"Who you really talkin to, Raylan?" Boyd asks, like he's got something on Raylan, like he's solved him. "Cause I think not a day goes by you don't think all that shit to yourself, and you can't abide not everyone in the world—"

Raylan doesn't wait to hear the rest of it, Boyd's insight into his fucking character; he takes fistfuls of Boyd' rough cotton undershirt and shoves him up against the bathroom wall. Boyd's eyes open wide, and he grunts softly as his back hits the plaster. Raylan can feel Boyd's ribs under his knuckles, and Boyd looks surprised, Raylan doing something Boyd didn't expect. Raylan's too vindicated in that, too pleased to have finally done something Boyd didn't expect of him. He has the sudden, catastrophic desire to see if he can do it again.

He uses his finger-holds on Boyd's shirt to shift him closer, until their mouths can't help but collide and maybe later Raylan can use that as some kind of excuse. He didn't kiss Boyd Crowder: the ground just shifted, and there they were.

Almost as soon as it happens he's pulling away. He can't look at Boyd, might never be able to look at Boyd again and he feels a giddy kind of regret at that. He's dizzy from the roads of possibilities spooling in front of him, dizzy from holding his breath to see what Boyd'll do. Every possibility is a bad one, and Raylan thinks for a sickening defiant moment that now he'll have to leave: Boyd will run him out of Harlan County.

Instead, Boyd reaches a hand between them. He drags his fingers across Raylan's stomach to get at his belt, and something about that knocks Raylan back from himself; he's seeing this from a distance now, watching himself press his face against the angle of Boyd's shoulder as Boyd undoes the button on his jeans. Knowing all the while how badly this is going to fuck him up, probably irrevocably, probably for the rest of his life.

Then Boyd's pulling his cock out of his jeans and Raylan comes back to himself. Boyd's saying _raylan raylan_ in a tone Raylan can't quite place, and Raylan says _shut up shut up_ like that'll absolve them of something. Boyd's fingers curl around the back of his neck and Raylan bites the salt skin of the hollow of Boyd's throat and they don't say anything else. The tiles on the wall are slick and cold when Raylan tries to brace his hand against them, and Boyd's skin is too hot to bear. Raylan feels trapped, out of control and he comes just like that, Boyd right behind him.

"Fuck," Raylan hisses against Boyd's jaw. He's made an arc-shaped mark on Boyd with his teeth, jagged and obscene.

Boyd pushes him away but not cruelly, not like this could never happen again. They stare at each other until it becomes unbearable, and Raylan has to step back, stumbling a little when his hip hits up against the sink. He does up his jeans, so intent on looking away from Boyd he looks at himself straight-on in the mirror, and that spooks him badly.

"Look—" Raylan says, and Boyd's shaking his head. He steps closer to Raylan and puts the pad of his thumb to Raylan's mouth, fingers spidered out over Raylan's jaw. He's staring at Raylan in a way that goes straight through Raylan's skin, and when he says "Don't say anything," quiet and harsh, Raylan knows he won't. He'll never speak of this again.

 

 

_august_

 

The convenience store is lit like a beacon in the dark Harlan night; Raylan trudges across the parking lot toward it like he's a moth and it's a more worthy flame. It's the closest place to his daddy's house where people don't know him, or won't care enough to ask after his split lip, the fact of his being there at all.

The night was sticky-hot when he set out and by now it's unbearable, heat crawling up from under his skin like it has a mind to itself. It's that point in the summer where he doesn't think he'll ever get cool again, heat sunk into his skin, bearing Harlan summers around inside him forever.

The bell above the door clatters as he walks in and it makes his breathing jump, his nerves already strung out under the bare fluorescent light. He slinks to the back of the store, hoping the kid manning the counter goes back to him comic and leaves Raylan the fuck alone.

"Raylan?" someone asks.

In the aisle in front of him Ava Murphy stands up from her crouch in front of the frozen foods case, looking for all the world like a flower, something blooming up from the gritty linoleum against all odds. She stands in front of him with one hand on her hip, hair falling tangled around her face and the corner of her mouth quirked up. Tiny denim shorts and plastic sandals, thin cotton tank top dotted with flowers the size of grains of rice. He's staring and she knows it, gives a proud little flick of her hair that transfixes him before she says his name again, "Raylan Givens."

"Ava," he says, drawing her name out on his tongue. He's smiling at her, a reflex: his lip stings and he doesn't care.

She holds up a cardboard pint of ice cream, sweating in the heat. "My friend Christy? Well, her boyfriend—Todd—just broke up with her," she says, answering a question he hadn't asked. She's talking a little too fast, trying to justify herself. "I drew the short straw, so." She shrugs, just a sweet curve of her shoulders. "I guess it wasn't so bad."

"Guess so," Raylan says. Ava's gotta be sixteen by now and looks it, hips filling out and her getting prettier by the day. They're still smiling at each other and it's not awkward; they've had a rhythm around each other since his junior year of high school, knowing how badly they want each other and knowing they won't ever do anything about it. Ava flirts knowing he'll play along, and he plays along knowing she knows he won't touch her.

She lowers her eyes, and her eyelashes, thick with mascara, fan out over her cheeks. "I was thinkin chocolate," she says, looking to the carton in her hand, "but maybe that ain't right. What d'you think?"

"Well, I do like chocolate," he tells her.

"Uh-huh." She flicks her hair back from her face. "Maybe I better go with that, then."

"Maybe."

She looks back up at him, and her expression changes just infinitesimally. "Oh, shit," she says, "what happened to your lip?"

He swipes his thumb over the cut and comes away with a streak of blood; there's a drop in his stomach, something inexplicably terrible about his bright blood coming in between them. He drags the pad of his thumb over his jeans. "Ain't nothin," he says.

She quirks her eyebrows. "You getting in fights up in Cumberland?" she asks, like maybe she'd like it if he said yes.

He smiles, sheepish, wishing that were the cause, and not Arlo on the better part of a bottle of Jim Beam. "Guess you've found me out," he says, figuring it's true enough, after a fashion: he's gotten enough split lips from fights up in Cumberland that it's really just chance that this isn't one of them.

Ava steps closer to him, so close Raylan could swear he can feel the heat of her body next to his. She kisses the corner of his mouth, just shy of the cut, watching him the whole time.

"Good seein you, Raylan," she says, and he gets out, "Ava." She skims past him and down the aisle, and he watches her go, helpless.

 

*

 

They sit out the back of Boyd's truck, legs dangling over the edge. Stripped down to undershirts coal-smudged and stained with sweat, not the aimless summer sweat they're slicked with now but the pointed sweat of bone-breaking work. It stiffs the cotton with salt and dries bitter on the backs of their necks, streaking paths through the coal dust they're wearing this summer like a second skin.

They finish off the beers Boyd'd swiped for them in short order, without a word; Raylan feels it catch up with him as he takes in mouthfuls of the last can, watches the world spin a little at the edges. Boyd is watching him out of the corner of his eye; Raylan can feel it even if he refuses to look, and that bothers him, Boyd's look and his knowing about it in such a base instinctual way. He wonders if he's drunk enough yet to do something about it.

Boyd doesn't let him wonder long: before Raylan's begun making up his mind Boyd's got a hand on the back of his neck, callused tips on his fingers over the knobs of Raylan's spine. Boyd's hands are heavy and delicate and probably Raylan's least favorite thing about him.

Raylan makes the mistake of turning to him, and he's not sure what he's thinking. He's not sure what he was going to say but now it's lost for good; Boyd's slung a leg over his lap and Raylan brings his hands up to his sides, runs his palms down the corrugated cotton of Boyd's undershirt. He buries his face in the crook of Boyd's shoulder and screws his eyes shut tight.

Boyd pushes him back on the truck bed and Raylan curls his fingers in Boyd's shirt, taking him with him. They scramble together to lay out flat, the rubber matting sticking to Raylan's shirt and dragging gritty over the skin of his shoulders. They go at it frantic so they don't have to think so much, both wanting badly to get off and knowing that if they think too hard they're not going to go through with it. Raylan knows this is the rhetoric of bad choices, that he should see this as a warning sign.

Instead he drags a hand through Boyd's hair, drawing his head down. Boyd's breath is hot and sour with beer, same as Raylan's own; Raylan kisses him hard enough to bruise. Boyd kisses him back, shoves a hand down the front of his jeans.

Afterward Boyd rolls off him, both of them wrenching in breath. Raylan can feel his heart beating in his chest and that scares him a little, like it might be trying to leave him for good. He is, also, a little drunker than he thought.

Boyd pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, sharp cardboard corners crushed and concave. He drags one out between his teeth and tosses the pack to Raylan without looking at him. It's light, only a few left, and skitters over Raylan's stomach like a leaf.

Raylan draws one out and Boyd lights it with a matchbook from the Cumberland bar they go to before work. They blow smoke to the sky, shoulders shoved together because the truck bed isn't big enough to contain them separated like this. Something about that fucks with Raylan's head, and badly.

He twists out the stub and drags himself up, sitting back against the cab and drawing one knee up to his chest. The night sky's low-slung and oppressive, sucking the breath from Raylan's lungs. He wonders, quick and awful, if this is what the rest of his life is going to look like.

Needing desperately to prove something, he says too loud out into the night, "You know, I ain't queer."

He could swear Boyd's shoulders go stiff, muscles locking up before he makes them relax. Boyd blows out a mouthful of smoke. "What, you think I am?" he asks. He looks over his shoulder at Raylan, just long enough to let Raylan know this is a dare.

Raylan scoffs, looks away. That's not what he'd meant at all.

 

*

 

They're at the Cumberland bar after a day in the mines, fourteen hours spent deep underground and by the time they get out the sky's gone dark. Something about that sits awfully with Raylan, never seeing the sun. He and Boyd aren't speaking to each other in anything but monosyllables and there's a bad feeling banked under his skin, irritability pressured into something much more insidious.

They break away from each other as soon as they walk in, sick of seeing the other's face. Raylan buries himself in a glass of Wild Turkey and won't pay attention to what Boyd does with himself, sick not just of seeing him but of the bizarre hold they exert over each other, grown from an unnatural proximity, every day spent buried underground together.

Regardless of all that, though, when there's a commotion over Raylan's shoulder and he hears the name _crowder_ spit out in the midst of it he looks over on instinct. Boyd's being threatened by some guy over a pool table and Raylan doesn't see the eight ball anywhere on the matted green felt, so he figures he knows the cause. He's seen Boyd play pool and has some sympathy for the guy now bellowing _motherfucker cocksucking asshole_ into Boyd's face, but nonetheless. This looks to be going south and quickly, and there's an insistent part of Raylan that recoils from the idea of watching Boyd get beat to hell without Raylan there next to him.

He gets up without really deciding to, finds himself walking over to the scuffle just in time to see the guy land a gut punch on Boyd, folding him in two like a ragdoll, and speaking of things that don't sit well with Raylan. He says, "Hey, asshole," and that's enough for the guy's friend to take notice of him and then he's really in it.

They fight dirty and they fight smart, learned how just by being angry kids growing up in a place like this. But the guys are bigger than them, heavier muscle than even what they've got from a few months now down in the mine, and they're getting beat pretty bad by the time the bartender's seen enough.

"All right, assholes," he says. He's old but sturdy, looks like he was carved from wood; he's a friend of Raylan's daddy but in this moment Raylan won't hold that against him. "Get outta here, don't wanna see your faces no more."

"These motherfuckers—" the one guy starts, the ring leader, but then the bartender pulls a shot gun from behind the bar, and they're scared off quick.

"Want you two outta here too," the bartender tells them, with a pointed look and the shotgun still in his hands. Raylan nods, gasping, and Boyd gets out a _yes, sir_. They pick themselves up off the floor, sawdust pricking their palms, sucking blood off their teeth.

They stagger out into the night, knuckles and lips split and their ribs aching. Raylan got a solid booted kick to the chest that's still bowing him over, making him suck shallow breaths in between his teeth; Boyd gets an arm around him, holding him up and Raylan lets him, and that, Raylan's inclined to think, is his first real mistake of the night. Boyd's arm is a heavy line of heat across his back and there's his heart pounding in his ears, adrenaline winging its way through his bloodstream.

He slings an arm around the back of Boyd's neck, allows him to drag them to Boyd's truck, and before they really realize it they're grinning at each other, a dumb adrenaline reflex more than anything but exhilarating nonetheless, an oil slick of excitement over the night.

"Think we coulda beat them," Raylan wheezes out. He remembers not twenty minutes ago abhorring the very sight of Boyd; now, with his face split open grinning and his arm across Raylan's back, Raylan can't stop looking.

"Well, we don't get outta here you might just be able to find out," Boyd tells him, ticking his head toward the guys, lurking around the parking lot like they're still looking for a fight.

"Give me like," Raylan says, "five minutes," and Boyd shouts a laugh. He says, "Try five days," and Raylan calls him a motherfucker, and then, they drive off into the night.

 

*

 

The elevator takes them down together, shoulder-to-shoulder into the mine. The steel screams and shakes, rattling down under the earth, and Raylan feels the familiar imploding fear in his chest, blooming under his ribs. There's a moment halfway down, every time, when he'd give anything to turn around and be back on the surface, his self-preservation instinct kicking in just a little too late, same as always.

The dark is alive down in the mine, thickened with coal dust and sweat. He can feel Boyd beside him like a ghost, unseen and unheard in the armageddon of the mine elevator, but there nonetheless, standing easy with his hands in his pockets and his feet spread to keep his balance. Boyd's never been afraid of it, and Raylan hates him for that.

He can close his eyes and open them again and the world in front of him looks the same, like a dream he can't wake up out of. It gets to him in a way he doesn't like to admit, a split second where he believes himself blind, and he switches on his headlamp before he needs to, just to have that thin beam of light stabbing out into the dark. This is probably a mistake: he feels Boyd shift beside him, and when he turns to look Boyd's face is spotlit, light cleaving off the sharp planes of his face.

Boyd says something, but Raylan can't hear a word, even Boyd's voice caught in the undertow of this flood of sound. Raylan's momentarily furious, each of his senses being stolen from him one by one.

Boyd says something else and Raylan watches his mouth move around the words, mesmeric: nothing in here seems real, and Raylan thinks momentarily of shoving Boyd up against the rusted elevator grating hard enough to press the gridded pattern into the skin of his back, covering his hypnotic mouth with Raylan's own. Neither of them able to see or hear, senses dragged away from them one by one until all they can do is hold on to each other in the dark and admit to their fate, buried deep under the earth.

Raylan swallows, looks away. The weak flood of light leaves Boyd's face. Their shadows scatter over the walls in the unsteady light, and the elevator goes on down.

 

THE END

**Author's Note:**

> title and summery from [margaret atwood](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/177292).


End file.
